Basically, it's a conflict between POSIX and ISO C what do to when
input streams are passed to fflush().
POSIX mandates that the seeking-position should be synced, but ISO C
says it's undefined behaviour.
We love POSIX, but the standard-documents specify that in all conflict
cases, ISO C wins, so this breaks with EBADF on BSD's.
musl and glibc follow POSIX behaviour, which makes sense, but involves
numerous portability concerns.
To get around this, we just don't check fflush() and rely on the fact
that no implementation sets ferror on the file-stream in fflush if it
is an input stream, so every issue caught in fflush() is caught later
with ferror() and fclose().
Add a comment to fshut() because this stuff is so complicated, it
took us a day to figure out.
This has been a known issue for a long time. Example:
printf "word" > /dev/full
wouldn't report there's not enough space on the device.
This is due to the fact that every libc has internal buffers
for stdout which store fragments of written data until they reach
a certain size or on some callback to flush them all at once to the
kernel.
You can force the libc to flush them with fflush(). In case flushing
fails, you can check the return value of fflush() and report an error.
However, previously, sbase didn't have such checks and without fflush(),
the libc silently flushes the buffers on exit without checking the errors.
No offense, but there's no way for the libc to report errors in the exit-
condition.
GNU coreutils solve this by having onexit-callbacks to handle the flushing
and report issues, but they have obvious deficiencies.
After long discussions on IRC, we came to the conclusion that checking the
return value of every io-function would be a bit too much, and having a
general-purpose fclose-wrapper would be the best way to go.
It turned out that fclose() alone is not enough to detect errors. The right
way to do it is to fflush() + check ferror on the fp and then to a fclose().
This is what fshut does and that's how it's done before each return.
The return value is obviously affected, reporting an error in case a flush
or close failed, but also when reading failed for some reason, the error-
state is caught.
the !!( ... + ...) construction is used to call all functions inside the
brackets and not "terminating" on the first.
We want errors to be reported, but there's no reason to stop flushing buffers
when one other file buffer has issues.
Obviously, functionales come before the flush and ret-logic comes after to
prevent early exits as well without reporting warnings if there are any.
One more advantage of fshut() is that it is even able to report errors
on obscure NFS-setups which the other coreutils are unable to detect,
because they only check the return-value of fflush() and fclose(),
not ferror() as well.
Mostly manpage-shuffling according to the changes in the corrigendum,
wording changes and more idiomatic expressions.
All this is finished up by marking the POSIX 2013 conformant tools
with
.St -p1003.1-2013
which is not available in older mandoc builds or nroff, but which
reflects what we actually did, so who cares?
This is a huge step and it's not far until we can release sbase 0.1.
It's not useful when 0 is returned anyway, so be sure that we have a
string with length > 0, this also solves some indexing-gotchas like
"len - 1" and so on.
Also, add checked getline()'s whenever it has been forgotten and
clean up the error-messages.
I can't believe we've come this far! The idea is to look at the
2013 POSIX corrigendum for each tool and deep-test features before
making the first 0.1 release.
To keep the noise low, I'll do this in batches, not on a per-tool-
basis (as many of these are trivial to test).
In the meantime, I'll also think of a fitting STANDARDS section
for the non-POSIX tools. Now that the audits are pretty much done,
I can also have a more relaxed view on standards compliance instead
of having to dig through some uncleaned mess.
To mark this "new beginning", the README has gotten a liftover.
The POSIX 2008-column was more or less useless and as I expect the
checks to go along pretty quickly, I "reset" the compliance state
of all but the non-POSIX tools and will then go along and check every
single one of them in the next few days.
Apart from the few missing flags and audits, sbase should then be
ready to hit the world with the first release after 4 years of work.
